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Nov 6, 2025
I like to talk, and, sometimes, when I find that I’m droning on and on, I rein myself in by calculating an interestingness ratio. The I-ratio, as I think of it, relates the...
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Oct 2, 2025
Around twenty years ago, when I was a graduate student in English, I taught a class in a special observation room at my university’s teaching center. My students and I sat...
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Aug 29, 2025
I often wake up before dawn, ahead of my wife and kids, so that I can enjoy a little solitary time. I creep downstairs to the silent kitchen, drink a glass of water, and put in my...
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Jun 18, 2025
What do you read, and why? A few decades ago, these weren’t urgent questions. Reading was an unremarkable activity, essentially unchanged since the advent of the modern...
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May 28, 2025
Last spring, Daniel Kokotajlo, an A.I.-safety researcher working at OpenAI, quit his job in protest. He’d become convinced that the company wasn’t prepared for the future...
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Apr 2, 2025
My in-laws own a little two-bedroom beach bungalow. It’s part of a condo development that hasn’t changed much in fifty years. The units are connected by brick paths that...
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Jan 10, 2025
Not long ago, my six-year-old son was in the bath, building cities out of colorful foam blocks. (“City blocks!” he said. “Get it?”) One metropolis, on the...
Nov 6, 2025I like to talk, and, sometimes, when I find that I’m droning on and on, I rein myself in by calculating an interestingness ratio. The I-ratio, as I think of it, relates the...
Oct 2, 2025Around twenty years ago, when I was a graduate student in English, I taught a class in a special observation room at my university’s teaching center. My students and I sat...
Aug 29, 2025I often wake up before dawn, ahead of my wife and kids, so that I can enjoy a little solitary time. I creep downstairs to the silent kitchen, drink a glass of water, and put in my...
Jun 18, 2025What do you read, and why? A few decades ago, these weren’t urgent questions. Reading was an unremarkable activity, essentially unchanged since the advent of the modern...
Apr 2, 2025My in-laws own a little two-bedroom beach bungalow. It’s part of a condo development that hasn’t changed much in fifty years. The units are connected by brick paths that...
Jan 10, 2025Not long ago, my six-year-old son was in the bath, building cities out of colorful foam blocks. (“City blocks!” he said. “Get it?”) One metropolis, on the...